by Devin Murphy
“Joe wants us to help get the rest of the girls settled for the night in the dining hall,” I said, but he didn’t move. “Kurt.”
“The roof caved in, Lewis,” he said.
“We have to go to the camping supply shed to get bedding for these girls,” I said.
“I ran the wires for the lights in there. I ran them along the ceiling.” He cupped his hands over his mouth and kept talking. “Jesus, I ran those wires.” When I leaned in closer I heard that he was now talking in some other language, and I knew this sound and the smoke on the mountain would be in my dreams.
“Kurt, come on,” I said, reaching my hand under his elbow to pull him away.
In the morning, Kurt walked into Joe’s office with a snake’s rattle in his hands. He lifted it up to us and shook it.
“You get one?” Joe asked.
Kurt shook the rattle again between his thumb and pointer finger.
“You don’t look so good,” Joe said.
Kurt tossed the rattle at me and I caught it before it hit my chest. In my open palm, it looked like the tiny stacked ringlets of a spinal column. Kurt looked like he hadn’t blinked since we separated last night. “I laid the wires in that cabin,” he said to Joe.
“I know.” Joe stood up and walked toward Kurt and hugged him. “Nothing we can do about that,” Joe said with his huge arms embracing Kurt. Kurt’s arms were limp at his sides and he didn’t make a move to hug Joe back or step away. He seemed disappointed in Joe’s reaction, like he was hoping to be hit instead. “Let’s work on what we can change,” Joe said, as he let go of Kurt. “All right. I’m supposing we ought to make a showing of it at least.” He waved us to follow him. The word supposing ran through my head. Kurt got in the passenger side, and I hopped in the back of the truck’s four-door cab.
We drove to where the fire was. The early-morning fog still had a hint of smoke to it. Joe wanted me to mow a helicopter landing pad in the center of the field, where we’d make a circle of light to illuminate a ring on the dark mountainside for helicopters if anything like this ever happened again. He had Kurt calculate the amount of wattage we needed for the lights. Kurt had a little journalist notepad that he used to figure out the math. He kept referring to a phonebook-size electrician’s chart and the Grainger catalog he kept in the back of the truck to match up what parts we needed. Of course, this planning was all too late. That one little girl was already in the hospital in Cheyenne getting breath pushed into her lungs by a machine.
The two of them left me to clear the field while they went to the hardware store to get the lights and cables. As I got all my equipment I imagined the eyes of bugs and squirrels and kestrels in the woods last night watching the fiercely glowing flame, their eyes reflecting the light. They would have been perched on what one of the books in my cabin—The Alpine Arborist—classified as Douglas firs, Rocky Mountain junipers, quaking aspens, lodgepoles, and pond pines. Some of these trees were “serotinous,” meaning they require fire to open their seeds, which fall to the burned ground and start renewing everything.
I was pickaxing a six-inch-deep trench to run the wire when a shard of rock shot up and grazed my left eye. I covered that eye with my hand and walked to the mess hall bathrooms with the mirrors to see if I was okay. The little girls who’d been displaced by the fire were all still in their sleeping bags sprawled out on the floor. They’d all seen their friend on fire, and as much as I worried for the little girl in the hospital, I worried for these girls too. I knew it took only one small thing to fuck a little kid up, and then they have to spend the rest of their lives trying to move past it. One girl, still in her sleeping bag, watched me with my hand over my eye. I imagined she’d tell her friends my name was “All But.”
I knocked on the bathroom door and said, “Maintenance” six times. I bent my neck to get a closer look at my face in the mirror. The microfiber-size capillaries stretched out like a vascular system, and the white of my left eye had a splattered egg-shaped bruise mark that I suddenly wished would spread, shadowing any lasting image of the burning girl from my mind.
When I walked back past the girls I held a wet paper cloth over my eye. On the trail back to the burned cabin I found giant padded footprints. Each was the size of a cantaloupe with dark holes where the nails sank into the dirt. A book in my cabin—Large Mammals of North America—talked about how avalanches in the winter catch unsuspecting animals like deer, and preserve them in the snow until spring, when bears wake up from hibernation to find the refrigerator at the base of the mountain fully stocked. It’s a small little cycle that provides calories when they’re most needed. The book also said that after spring, the black bear tends to wander farther and farther looking for food sources. I wanted Joe and Kurt to be back so I could show them the prints. I knew the burning smell from the cabin fire brought the bear, and the phrase food sources ran through my head.
After his investigation, the state’s fire marshal told us that a faulty wire connection in the overhead lights had sparked. The sparks fell into the rubber trash bin full of paper towels, which ignited and filled the main room with smoke before flames crept along the wall and filled the bunk room. Kurt was next to me when we found out. I saw him swallowing some crushed expression on his face but he stood there as if he’d already accepted the blame.
The investigator told us that the girl was still in critical condition in the burn unit.
Joe told us the girl’s family attorney had already contacted the Girl Scouts of the United States, and they might try to force the ranch to close.
A day after the fire marshal finished his investigation, we started tearing down the remnants of the burned cabin. We used the auger drill on the back of the tractor to unearth the floor beams and baseboards so we could plow them away.
“Y’all be careful with that thing,” Joe said. I could tell he knew how hungover Kurt was. “I saw a guy get killed by getting caught in one of them and it ripped his balls off,” Joe said to make sure we paid attention.
That night, I couldn’t stop thinking about the wounded girl in the hospital. Her injury felt in some way connected to all the other hurts in my life, layering up like they do, with each new layer making you feel everything again, all the way down to the first hurt. Everything that had led me to be here in the middle of the mountains. My mother. My father. My brother and sister struggling to make their own paths. I got out of bed, but seeing how small and empty my cabin was didn’t make things any better. In moments like this, I had a very hard time finding anything to look forward to, and I could only wait this feeling out until morning, when I watched the sunlight gush up the mountains, and tried to memorize the contours of every jagged stone.
A month later, on a hot July day, Kurt and I went to the western border of the property to clear some of the horse trails. In the John Deere Gator we drove by a group of girls walking single file down the road between two counselors. They all turned their backs to us so the truck wouldn’t throw dirt in their faces, and as we passed them I saw how the sun caught in their hair. After we passed, Kurt leaned in close to me and sung a few guttural lyrics of a sad-sounding song that I couldn’t understand.
“That’s Farsi,” he said. Then he got real quiet. “I feel sick about that fire,” he said, breaking our unwritten code of not talking about it.
I leaned in closer so I could hear what he wanted to say. “Are you okay?” I asked him.
“This is real life up here. It’s the true ugly and the high lovely.” Kurt lifted and dropped his sunglasses off his eyes, and mumbled something again in some other language.
“The beetles kill a tree in about five years,” Kurt said, changing the subject. “They suck the sap out from the inside like parasites.” I looked around us on the trail. It was one of the most beautiful places I’d ever been in my life. The forested hillside was quiet too, with only those noises the mountain makes—rocks sigh, trees groan. Kurt didn’t seem interested in talking anymore. It was quiet until we dragged out the chain
saw and started cutting down trees, already dead from Russian pine beetles, that were in danger of falling on the trail.
The tree trunks snapped off where they’d been cut at the base. There was a moment, when the saw stopped as the tree was falling, that things were completely silent again. Then branches drove into the dirt and snapped off before the tree crashed and the thud shook under our boots.
I cut down a few trees the way Kurt showed me, cutting a wedge from the opposite side I wanted it to fall before cutting across the trunk. I counted 118 rings on one of the trunks.
The woods we drove through were so beautiful. Each tree was full of amber-yellow light that I felt sink into me—like warm amber beetles that then slowly drained everything away, making me feel lighter as Kurt drove on.
In early August, Kurt offered to take me out one night. He drove us down Dead Hawk Highway to old Route 287 and over to Laramie. The fog was so bad we had zero visibility. Kurt let a semi go ahead of us, so he could follow the red strip lights of its trailer, and creep ahead until the semi took another route closer to the city. In Laramie the heavy fog bank lifted over the foothills so we could see the windmill farms, train tracks, and refineries. There were little tin-can trailers tucked into the rows of other tin-can trailers. The oil field owners held the deeds to most of them and rented them to the workers. From the road, the whole trailer park looked like a giant aluminum graveyard. Every bend off the road led to places like this, where people made lives which were, to me, completely foreign and unreachable, yet which I longed to know—as if living a moment of each, strange and lovely, would be the only way to know the world.
I was excited to be getting off the mountain. I had spent my nights waiting for morning, smashing golf balls off the deck, into the field, or shooting arrows at the plastic deer I set against a few hay bales off to the side of my cabin. Other than that, I read. I can’t explain how desperate for any sort of significant human contact this left me.
Kurt parked the truck next to a few dozen other trucks in a parking lot behind a bar and turned the engine off without saying anything. He had his heavy boots and a pair of formfitting Carhartt pants on.
“This bar no longer has a door,” Kurt said, and pointed to the entrance. “It’s been broken so many times they put up a slab of particle board on the hinges instead. The board has the last names of everyone who can’t come back inside. All banned for getting drunk and fighting.”
“What’s your last name?” I asked.
“Don’t worry about that.”
He didn’t say a word as we walked into the bar, but I watched him closely anyway. He had a heavy jaw like a giant dog, and his upper body was hard, and his forearms were deeply tanned with their two blue rings. He was the indistinct sort that if you saw across the street you wouldn’t wonder anything about his life. Though when he was close to you and you saw that his eyes were like the holes at the end of pistols, you snapped to some sort of alertness in his presence.
Inside, Kurt sat down and started ordering Seagram’s 7 whiskey shots, drinking one after the other until he was talking loudly, mumbling in other languages. He then started trying to pick a fight with every man up and down the bar. He got several whipped up enough that they shouted at him like excited monsters, but no one would take him up on his offer, and again, that look of disappointment seemed to wash over him as he stumbled through the rest of the evening.
I tried to cajole him away from trouble until three men finally had enough and dragged drunken Kurt out of the bar and tossed him onto the gravel where he couldn’t stand on his own. This made him scream, “You bastard!” over and over. I wanted to tell the three men that something important in Kurt had grown cancerous, and though I couldn’t be sure, it may be contagious.
“That’s one crazy SOB,” one of the men said, but without any real shock or reverence for the whimpering rage they’d just seen. They struck me as very hard, old children.
Kurt called me a bastard as I helped him off the ground, and this made me want to scream in his face—You drunken man-baby, look how ridiculous you are. I shoved his shoulder to move him toward the truck, which made me feel strong, powerful, but he spun on me and pushed me away so hard I fell onto the gravel. Back in the truck I became fully aware he invited me here so I could drive him home. It made me feel foolish for thinking he was being kind to me. By the time I made peace with that fact, we were already working our way out of Laramie. When I got toward the highway Kurt told me to pull off the road and go down a dirt path.
“Here!” he yelled, and looked at me like he was going to break my neck. I was suddenly very scared of him.
I turned off the main road and drove through the woods. “I fish here,” Kurt mumble-yelled to me. As we rocked over a dirt path on the way to the river, Kurt made whimpering sounds every time we hit a pothole.
“You sure you’re not going to die on me, now?” I asked Kurt. He jawed away our whole drive from Laramie. Words came easy to him. But I couldn’t imagine telling anyone about this—about the stories I was collecting in the west. I really couldn’t think of anyone to tell. I parked where the wooded dirt road opened up to the exposed bank of the Laramie River. I walked upstream and stripped down so I was wearing only my boxers and walked into the river. When I leaned into the current, the water rolled off the slope of my shoulders and my limbs quickly went numb from the cold. The only thing I could hear was the rush of water pushing against me. When I lifted my head Kurt was in his underwear and walking into the river. Both of his legs were sleeved in totemic clan tattoos. There seemed to be no awareness of guilt in him for his earlier behavior. He was just a man walking into the water to clean himself off. I looked away. I dunked my head under again, and I wanted the river to rise higher and take me away, rise higher yet and take us all.
I had an even worse time sleeping after our trip to Laramie. I found myself on my deck watching the stars late at night. I watched the girls sneak through the field. I silently watched over them, as if proving something to myself, that I had some task here, as if that was all I really needed to feel fully alive. There had already been hundreds of little girls who’d passed through the camp since the fire, and each night, before I slept, I swore, I could hear them all. They had all left something of themselves on the mountain. I was happy for that too, knowing that on the outskirts of the ranch lay the chaos of their daily lives, filled with obligations and restraints of youth. Here, they ran free, and it was now my job to help keep whatever was waiting for them up the mountain away.
One night I could see that there was a campfire a mile behind my cabin. Stepping off my deck I smelled the wood and ash on the air. A group of girls was singing up there. The sound hit me like a secret, rich and sweet. I listened until they were quiet. Then the mountain noises took over. There were creatures snapping the twigs in the underbrush. This high up, there were tree frogs and cicadas that clicked at each other all night. Even the wind had a voice. In the darkness, I imagined the wind curling around like a banner floating in space. The image let me know how cyclical and tightly wound the natural world was, such that everything provided for everything else. And I knew the mountain itself was a book about those cycles.
I stepped off the deck and wandered into the forest. The sky was marbled by clouds covering the moon. There was an orange flush of campfire light through the trees. I walked toward the site as if it were all I ever wanted, a peaceful place to recover from my life so far. Then I heard the large snap of a branch behind me.
Some fear I hadn’t felt in a long time slithered link by link up my spine, and I turned to see whatever it was.
Whatever was coming through the trees stopped in the darkness. I shut my eyes, and said nothing, hoping that this, finally, would be the right language to use.
In the hard darkness just below the tree line, I waited for a giant bear, the burning camper, or the bones of the dead horse with its head swaying toward its feet in that odd, broken angle. I could see them all, and searched for any words to
let whatever was coming know I was there.
“Who’s there?”
“Well—I’m supposing it’s just a man from Cackalacky,” the darkness said back. I saw a flash of his camouflage fatigues before Kurt moved away from me, this fellow man, hungry as the animals, starving for some labor to make him feel alive again. He wandered off into the gray—where in the evening and beyond, there is only a loose interpretation of how we should go about living.
I turned eighteen later that summer. And as the last of the Girl Scouts packed their bags for the season, I decided to do the same. I had caught the tail end of the mountain winter and did not want to weather a whole one. Joe had Kurt drive me to Cheyenne after a last day of working. Kurt wore his large black rubber-heeled motorcycle boots and drove too fast on the mountain turns.
I was relieved when the mountains leveled out and there were no more hairpin turns. Kurt drove even faster where the road bobbed up and down along cattle-grazing country. A dome of stars blanketed the sky. Just beyond the front range, Kurt stopped the truck and we both got out and climbed onto the roof. He had his binoculars and scanned the darkness and stars overhead.
“Not much of a telescope, but you can see a bit closer with these.”
I scanned the night sky above the full sprawl of the northwesternmost Great Plains. The stars felt so low and bright that I could run my finger under them like a wind chime.
When he reached for the binoculars I caught a glimpse of his blue tattoo bands in the dark.
We stood there for a long time gazing up at the endless night sky.
When he turned the truck back on the road he pressed his heavy boot into the accelerator and we started gaining speed. He leaned forward as if he had a stiff back.
“You’re going pretty fast,” I said when I looked over and saw he was doing ninety miles an hour.
His foot eased off the gas. When I saw we had slowed down to eighty-five, I looked at the road and saw the outline of a black shorthorn cow twenty feet ahead and filling our lane. Kurt yanked the wheel to the right where the tires ground over gravel and our lights shone directly in front of us on another giant shorthorn that must have broken through the wire fence. Kurt heaved the wheel to the left, and back on the road between the two cows.
